God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness and Embodied Spiritual Practice

God in Your Body:

Kabbalah, Mindfulness and Embodied Spiritual Practice

2008 Second Printing

2007 First Printing

© 2007 by Jay Michaelson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Michaelson, Jay, 1971–

God in your body: Kabbalah, mindfulness and embodied spiritual practice/

Jay Michaelson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-58023-304-0 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 1-58023-304-X (pbk.)

1. Spiritual life—Judaism. 2. Body, Human—Religious aspects—Judaism.

3. Meditation—Judaism. 4. Cabala. I. Title.

BM723.M448 2006 296.7—dc22

2006028753

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Manufactured in the United States of America

Published by Jewish Lights Publishing

A Division of LongHill Partners, Inc.

Sunset Farm Offices, Route 4, P.O. Box 237

Woodstock, VT 05091

Tel: (802) 457-4000     Fax: (802) 457-4004

www.jewishlights.com

In my flesh, I see God.

Job 19:26

Only the nonsensical is

at ease with the Absolute.

Listen to your angels

ripening your secrets.

Come to beautiful terms

with the god in your body.

James Broughton

Contents

Introduction

The Union of Body and Soul

God?

The Idea of Practice

Cutting and Pasting

An Invitation

1.   Eating

V’achalta: Eating Meditation

V’savata: Experiencing Satisfaction

U’verachta: Count your Blessings

Transparent Kashrut

2.   Praying

Embodied Jewish Prayer

Sweat Your Prayers—Hasidic Style

Every Limb Will Praise You: Jewish Liturgy and the Body

3.   Breathing

Basic Breathing Meditation

Adding God to your Breath

4.   Walking

Basic Walking Meditation

Four Ways to Walk with God

5.   Using the Bathroom

Asher Yatzar: The Bathroom Blessing

Toilet Zen: Meditation for the Restroom

6.   Sex

Sex Is Holy

Practicing Sacred Sexuality

7.   Mirroring the Divine

Contemplating the Miniature World

Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation

Embodying the Ten Sefirot

Looking in the Mirror

8.   Exercising

Spiritual Exercise: Beyond the Mat

A Four Worlds Workout

9.   Dancing

Ecstatic Dancing, Sacred and Secular

The Quartet and the Mosh Pit

10.  Fasting

The Benefits of Denial

Fasting in Context: The Five Minor Fasts

Fasting as Catharsis: Yom Kippur

11.  Washing

Is Cleanliness Next to Godliness?

Washing as a Spiritual Practice

12.  The Mikva

Waters of Rebirth

Solitary Mikva Practices

Communal Mikva Practices

Beyond the Mikva

Your Blood Is a Blessing (by Holly Taya Shere)

13.  Nature

Mindfulness in Nature

The Path of Blessing

14.  The Five Senses

Sound

Smell

Touch

Taste

Sight

15.  Embodied Emotions

Feeling Emotions in the Body

Kabbalah’s Map of the Heart-Body

16.  Sickness and Health

Spiritual Practice in Sickness and in Health

The Deeper Meaning of Health

17.  Life Cycle

Birth and Childhood

Adulthood: Coming of Age, Partnering, and Aging

Death

18.  Just Being

Appendix: Four Worlds—A Kabbalistic Map of Our Experiential Universe

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Credits

Acknowledgments

Topical Index

Index of Practices

About Jewish Lights

Copyright

Introduction

The Union of Body and Soul

This book is about embodied spiritual practice: how to experience the deep truths of reality in, and through, your body. To some, this may seem like a contradiction. Aren’t spirit and body separate? Isn’t a spiritual experience precisely one that is out of body, in a special state of mind?

In the paths we will explore here, spirit and body are not separate at all. Nor is spirituality a special feeling, or a trance, or a vision, although such phenomena may accompany some spiritual practices. Rather, because Being is omnipresent, the experience of spirituality is nothing more or less than a deep, rich experience of ordinary reality. Realization is simply waking up. And the body, because it is always present here and now, is both the best vehicle for doing so, on the one hand, and, on the other, how holiness expresses itself in the world.

Jews are sometimes called the people of the book. But as many scholars have observed, they are equally the people of the body. Consider the core practices of mainstream Jewish religion. Traditional observance of the Sabbath and holidays involves not beliefs or spiritual feelings, but taking and refraining from certain physical actions. Jewish dietary laws are about foods, not sentiments; Jewish ethics is about action, not intention. Even Jewish prayer—built around the kneeling (Barchu), listening (Shema), and standing (Amidah) prayers—is based not upon some abstract soul or spirit, but upon the body. This body-centricity of the Jewish tradition is well known in academic and scholarly circles but, ironically, forgotten in many religious ones.

Even the Kabbalah, the vast body of Jewish mystical and esoteric literature, understands the greatest spiritual achievement not as transcending the body, but as joining body and spirit together. Symbolically, the Kabbalists imagined the six-pointed Jewish star as one triangle pointing upward—toward heaven, transcendence, and the emptiness of the Infinite—and another pointing downward, toward the earth, immanence, and the endless varieties of experience. The great goal of Kabbalah, which literally means receiving, is not to privilege one triangle over the other—to flee the material world in favor of the spiritual one, or vice versa. It is the sacred marriage of the two.

This union has many iterations: body and spirit, earth and sky, experience and theory, the Presence and the Holy One, feminine and masculine, immanence and transcendence, form and emptiness, the many manifest energies of the world and their ultimate, essential unity. And the opportunities for consummating it are omnipresent, because there are no boundaries around the Infinite. Thus religion belongs in bed as well as in the sanctuary; and bodywork belongs in temples as well as on yoga mats. Sex, eating, bathing—these are not necessary evils in the Kabbalah. Rather, the body, about which there is often so much shame and so much fear, is the most practical place for spiritual work.

This integral vision is reflected in the kabbalistic concept of the four worlds,¹ which is used often in this book as an organizing principle for spiritual practice. Each of the worlds (a chart is in the Appendix) has a nest of symbolic associations and experiential elements, but perhaps their most important feature is that, because each world is important, the familiar hierarchies of spirit over body, and mind over heart, suddenly make no sense. As we will see, the worlds of asiyah (action), yetzirah (formation), briyah (creation), and atzilut (emanation) and the four souls of nefesh (fleshly, earth-soul), ruach (emotional, water-soul), neshamah (intellectual, air-soul), and chayah (spiritual, fire-soul) roughly map onto the familiar matrix of body, heart, mind, and spirit. But all are really a reflection of yechidah (unity). Thus the ideal is not transcendence alone, but transcendence with inclusion of the lower in the higher. Forgetting the body in favor of the soul is like forgetting the foundation of a house in favor of the living room; it will not hold.

The values of integration, union, and balance affect how one studies this wisdom as well. On the one hand, intellectual theories give meaning and shape to experience. On the other hand, experience is essential: material, embodied experience—that which often wanders in exile, like a forgotten princess awaiting her redemption. Enlightenment is simply knowing the truth of what is, but knowing like the knowing of Adam by Eve. Secret wisdom, such as that of Kabbalah, is not secret simply because its formulae are not disclosed; with just a few years of education, you can learn their words. Rather, secret wisdom is such because it is experiential wisdom, and thus impossible to convey in words at all.

So, in this book we will speak of both theory and practice. For some, there may be too many words, too many concepts; for others, too much emphasis on subjective experience. Yet an integral spirituality, one that marries heaven and earth, must embrace intellect and the body, tradition and experience, analytical rigor and spiritual courage. Both sides are essential: the abstract (God) and the concrete (your body). Theories of the body, pathways of the soul—these are wonderful maps and excellent recipes for wisdom. But the map is not the territory, and the recipe is not the meal.

God?

What is meant by the word God? And how does an experience in your body have anything to do with God in your body?

When I use the word God in an intellectual, third-person way, I mean what the ancient Hebrews called YHVH—What Is; Being; What Was, Is, and Will Be. Intellectually, for monotheists, God is Ein Sof, infinite, and thus must fill all creation; otherwise, God would go up until a certain point and then have a limit—and thus, not be infinite. Consequently, what appear, on the surface, to be computers, trees, and hamburgers are actually, in their essence, God. The Ein Sof is not a figure within or beyond the universe, a person who either does or does not exist; the Ein Sof is the ground of being itself. Forms that appear to be real are really manifestations of It. Or, to paraphrase a teaching from another tradition, God does not exist; God is existence itself.²

But what if you don’t believe in God in this way? Feel free to set aside the word God and focus simply on waking up from illusion into reality. It’s easy to see that ordinary experience is usually obscured by desires, conventions, and social constructions—walk into a room and see what you notice, how quickly your mind judges it as good or bad, and how much of our involvement with life is really involvement with the small self, the selfish egoic inclinations. Even linguistic and social concepts construct our experience of reality. For example, if you’re sitting in a chair right now, why are you not falling on the floor? Because of the chair? Or because of all sorts of molecular properties of wood or metal that derive from invisible forces of electromagnetism and gravity, and on and on and on? And who are you apart from the illusions produced by a well-functioning brain, like the images at the cinema that seem to be so whole? The sum of all these forces, beyond label, beyond self—this is what is meant by Being. Nothing more.

So much for the plane of the mind. In the realm of the heart, when I speak of God in the second person, as You, then the God-language of myth and anthropomorphism is not a symptom of fuzzy thinking but an expression of yearning. Not rational, but, then, neither is love—and would we be the richer for auditing out these errors from our experience? I find that when I relate to Being as God, I am able to better cultivate love, reverence, connection, personal relationship, gratitude, value, and ethics. The heart prays and cries and opens—and the object of these hopes, perhaps half-projected, I find echoed in the millennia of Jewish yearning for God.

So I invite you to stay with experience, rather than theology. Rather than starting from a position of God exists, therefore I must be grateful to Him/Her/It, just use the body to experience gratitude, and see what happens. In the first chapter, for example, we will look at eating as a spiritual practice. Our bodies are hardwired to enjoy eating, and yet we often seem bored by it and distract ourselves with television, or reading, or conversation. With close attention to a few bites of our meal, though, amazing things can happen. The words v’achalta, v’savata, u’verachta—you will eat, you will be satisfied, and you will bless—suddenly make sense. The mind is quieted, the body is energized, and the food tastes more delicious than usual. Our attention is called to the miracle of eating: that you are turning lettuce into human, that your body knows exactly what to do to take what it needs from the food and discard the rest. All that’s needed is time and attention. Try it and see.

Consider, too, the miracles we can’t perceive. At this moment, there are more than seventy-five trillion cells in your body. How might that help explicate the Psalmist’s joy: ma gadlu ma’asecha yah—how great are your creations, Yah? Or the midrashic idea, in Bereshit Rabba 12, that The King of Kings counts every limb in your body, puts it in its proper place, and builds you to perfection, as it says ‘is he not your father, who created you, the one who fashioned and established you?’ How would our sages respond to knowing that we each lose, on average, three million cells every second? How does this influence our understanding of God as mechayeh meitim, that which gives life to the dead?

Let theology follow experience. In chapter after chapter, our goal will be simple: through the body, to release the hold of the small, illusory, always-desiring self—the yetzer hara—and uncover our true natures beneath and beyond. Without any theology, without any doubt or belief—just to experience what is, instead of the illusions our minds are frantically creating. Ordinary reality is plenty.

The Idea of Practice

Practice, then, is the key: actually doing, actually experiencing. Of course, we all know about practice in the sense of football practice, practicing the piano, or practicing law, but what is meant by a spiritual practice?

On the simplest level, spiritual practice is what’s called in the Jewish tradition avodah, the work humans do for God. That’s what practices are: doing something for a contemplative, religious, or spiritual purpose. Ritually washing the hands, meditating, observing the Sabbath—all of these are actions with a purpose: perhaps a sense of spirituality, or the maintenance of a divine covenant, or connection with community.

On a deeper level, the idea of practice is quite subtle. First, practice is not dependent on preference; it contains preferences. For example, suppose you observe the Sabbath only when you are in need of a rest. In that case, Shabbat is so dependent upon mood that it is barely a practice at all. But if it is observed in a committed way, then the full range of emotional and intellectual life can be experienced through its prism, and effects can unfold that you could not have predicted in advance. So, too, with meditation. If you’re meditating only until you feel like getting up, then, in a sense, you’re not meditating at all, because the point of meditation is to see clearly whatever arises—including the strong desire to stop, the doubt that it’s working, and, occasionally, redemptive, surprising moments of insight and revelation. A practice is done no matter what not for strictness’s sake, but so that it can be a prism that casts light upon the mind.

Second, practices are best understood in functional, not mythical, terms. From the perspective of practice, the question is not where an act comes from (God, history, etc.), but what it does. Again, this function need not be making us feel good or spiritual. Quite the contrary, the function of kashrut (dietary laws) for a traditional Jew may be to make her feel as if she is transcending preference and obeying divine command. For another person, the function of kashrut may be to sanctify eating according to a traditional method. For a third, it may indeed lead to a spiritual feeling. For all, though, the practice does something. With this practical orientation, certain otherwise immovable doubts (e.g., that God wrote the Torah, or that a personal God exists at all) become less crucial, because the way to judge a practice is not by its origination myth but by its fruits. What does a life of Torah and mitzvot (commandments) do? What does saying a blessing when you go to the bathroom do? None of this is to banish healthy skepticism or doubt. Rather, the idea of practice is to keep doubting—but keep doing, also, in order to obtain the evidence that you seek. Na’aseh v’nishmah, say the Israelites at Sinai: we will do, and by doing, we hope to understand. To once more have recourse to the culinary metaphor, reading a cookbook can be informative, but the practice is in preparing, and tasting, the meal. Approach practices with a mind of curiosity, and a little benefit of the doubt, and see what happens.

Finally, avodah can be anything, if done with intention. As the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, a nineteenth-century summary of Jewish law, says:

Our rabbis of blessed memory said, What is a short verse upon which the entire body of the Torah depends? ‘In all ways know God.’ (Proverbs 3:6) This means to know God even in the ways you fulfill your bodily needs, and to do them for the sake of God’s name. For example: eating, drinking, walking, sitting, lying down, standing up, having sex, conversation—all the needs of your body can be for the service (avodah) of your Creator, or something that leads to it.³

Cutting and Pasting

In a way, embodied Jewish practice is simply a reunion. The mainstream Jewish tradition is already relentlessly embodied: the overwhelming majority of its commandments are performed with the body, its sacred myths are embodied (think of Abraham’s circumcision, Isaac’s binding, and Jacob’s wrestling), and Jewish theology rarely negates the physical world in favor of some future one. Indeed, even the world to come is often seen as a resurrection of the physical body, beginning with the luz, the indestructible bone at the base of the spine.⁴ Yet as we all know, contemporary Jewish practice can often seem very disembodied—intellectual text study, prayers on the verge of glossolalia, and ritual practices whose material reality is eclipsed by symbolism, legalism, or myths of origination. However much we may aspire to be Israel, Godwrestlers, most of us are still Jacob (Yaakov), defined by, and often wounded in, the body.

Thus this book is a meeting between careful, mindful attention and a wise, embodied tradition that has lost some of its self-awareness over the years. Perhaps in a quieter time, with fewer distractions and technologies of amusement, it was easier to observe the miraculousness of the mundane. Today, however, we need first to interrupt the insistent momentum of contemporary life, to remember we are embodied beings not defined by our cell phones. It is for this reason that I have used many technologies of mindfulness in this book, and have tried to be open about their diverse origins. Many come from the Jewish tradition. Many others come from Buddhism, Sufism, and other contemplative paths. This is not to dress up our spiritual practice in foreign or fancy clothing. On the contrary, it is to love God so simply and purely (with what the Hasidim call t’mimut, simplicity) that we can learn from Torah, dharma, Kabbalah, even the wisdom of pop songs.

If this cosmopolitan approach is not for you, you obviously have the choice to try some practices and skip other ones. However, importing Buddhist technology of mind into Jewish ritual practice is not so different from past imports of Christian and Muslim prayer modes, eastern European cuisine, or the classical symposium (now known as the seder). Sometimes the techniques of Buddhism, with their rigorous science of mind and clear maps of consciousness, are the right skillful means to deepen Jewish practices such as the blessings on going to the bathroom, or the walking movements in prayer. Other times, the joys, myths, and metaphors of the Jewish tradition bring new life to the most ordinary of moments.

Relatedly, there is no pretense here that what is being offered is a fair, objective overview of all that Judaism, or Kabbalah, has to say about the body. Judaism says everything about the body—that it is evil, that it is beautiful; that it is a prison, and a temple; that it is a mirror of the Divine, that it must be repressed; that it is sacred, and that it is profane. The body is in many ways a cultural artifact, and Judaism is a culture, not a creed; its many conflicting ideologies reflect the three thousand years of Jewish civilization. There are very few topics on which there is only one Jewish answer—and many reasons to flee those who claim otherwise.

In my own process of birur (sifting), I have chosen to emphasize those aspects of Jewish and world wisdom that treat the body as a sacred site for contemplative practice—and not merely the practice of repression. I have made a choice: sources that simply regard the body as an obstacle to spiritual development, or an inconvenient accident of creation, are not greatly represented here. In part, of course, this results from my attempt to provide those seeking a body-affirming, body-involved spiritual practice with teachings and tools to help them on their journeys. However, it also reflects my sense that the deeper one penetrates into the core of Jewish religious teaching, the farther one moves away from the simple asceticism that shames the body’s desires and relishes only the disembodied soul. Naturally, biblical and Talmudic texts are aware of the pitfalls of the body’s appetites. But neither regard the body as, itself, a place of sin. On the contrary, as we will see, these texts tend to celebrate the body, see it as a gift (really, a loan) from the Divine, and direct its powerful energies toward enlightened living.

An Invitation

Embodied spiritual practice, simply, works. Letting go of the mind, letting the body lead, and as a result transcending the illusions of the small mind to access a deeper consciousness—we are thus turned toward the holy. This is how to seize the day and suck the marrow out of life: to turn down the static of existence, and hear its subtle, softer music. Hakarat hatov, the sages called it: recognizing the good.

Jewish spiritual practice is an integral practice whose purpose is not to favor the body, heart, mind, or soul over the other parts of the self, but to join all four together, to experience life fully, richly, and deeply. Why obey the dietary laws if you could contemplate them instead? Why perform a physical circumcision if a spiritual one were good enough? Because the lower does not merely serve the higher. The body, independent of the heart’s stirring and the misgivings of the intellect, is the site of holiness; even if there is no apparent change in the mind, and no softening of the heart, transformation takes place within the field of the body. This is not consolation; it is liberation. By no longer evaluating experience according to how it makes me feel, the grip of an important illusion is loosened: the illusion that you are your mind, and that reality only matters when the ego is affected. Thus the body is simultaneously the ground of traditional Jewish law, and the deepest of its esoteric truths.

Man is of flesh, while the angels are of fire; but man is superior,⁵ said Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the nineteenth-century Hasidic master whose startling, innovative, and often quite challenging teachings will recur throughout this book. Why? Because we have the opportunity not merely to transcend our bodies, but to unite them with spirit. Of course, spiritual experiences can be very valuable; they offer glimpses of undreamt-of horizons and inspire the soul. But enlarging the field of significance beyond the bounds of preference—that is a mark of liberation. Beyond the circular spirituality of pleasant states of mind, even beyond mindfulness, lies the utter simplicity of the body itself: what one commentator has recently called bodyfulness.⁶ Just the body, breathing and touching and living in the world—with such simplicity are heaven and earth, hidden and revealed, Holy One and sacred Presence, united. Indeed, the marriage is already underway, and the wedding banquet is what you see before you now. Consider this your invitation.

1

Eating

You will eat, you will be satisfied, and you will bless YHVH, your God.

Deuteronomy 8:10

In almost every contemplative tradition, eating is regarded as a sacred act. From one perspective, consuming food is simply a necessity of the body—everyone must eat to survive. But eating can also be